Monday, May 14, 2012

A Quick Look at the Blekko Search API

While less of a household name than some of the other search
giants, the search engine Blekko also puts out a search API that can be incorporated
into a Perl script. There is a CPAN
module already available that serves as a wrapper between the Blekko API and
your Perl application (http://search.cpan.org/~wumpus/WebService-Blekko-1.00_07/lib/WebService/Blekko.pm),
but in this little code snippet we will focus on direct access to the Blekko
API. One option that direct access of
the API allows for that the CPAN module does not is retrieval of results in an
RSS format.

The Blekko API works via a GET request and requires at a
minimum that the query of interest be appended to the URL as follows:

While
this will work to retrieve results in an HTML format, slashtags can be
specified to retrieve results in a different format. /json will result in JSON results being
returned, while /rss will result in the results being returned in an RSS
format. Other slashtags such as /ps can
also be applied to further control the returned results. The /ps slashtag controls the number of
returned results. The demo code below
will make use of the /rss slashtag to retrieve XML results which will parsed
with the XML::LibXML module in order to extract the URL and description of each
result. The sample Perl code is as
follows:

Note, that at the time of this writing Blekko does not enforce the need for an API key, so it is not included in the example. However, they do issue API keys and thus may enforce their use in the future. Blekko API keys can be obtained from apiauth@blekko.com.